Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…Is Mormonism anti-American? Or quintessentially American? Quintessentially American, surely. I think that there’s — It’s interesting in that Mormon sexual ethics have repeatedly brought them into conflict with the dominant American culture. That fact and that reality is a sign that there exists some interesting tension between Mormonism and America as a whole. But nonetheless, Mormonism is — both in its actual lived experience and its theology — is unimaginable without . . . It has an American essence. There’s no more American figure in certain ways than Joseph Smith. The entire Mormon theology is built around an attempt . . . We were talking earlier about how could you integrate Islam, Judaism, and Christianity into one story, and I was failing to give Tyler a good answer. Mormonism is an attempt to do that, not with three religious traditions, but with the Americas. How do you integrate the Americas into what seems like the Old World–dominated story of Judaism and Christianity? And that is . . . To the extent that Mormonism is out to solve a problem, it’s to solve the problem of what about the Americas? What about all this world over here? In that way and various others that I could go on listing, I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still leaves it quintessentially American, just as . . . Let’s say, the drug culture of the late 1960s was in tension with bourgeois American society at that point, but Woodstock — there’s nothing more American than Woodstock. And in the same way, even when it’s in tension with whatever else is going on in the culture, there’s nothing more American than the Latter Day Saints. Next question.…

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